Diving with untreated sewage

[Soakedlontra]

Hello Folks!

I have just come back from a long week-end diving trip to Victoria, Vancouver Island, BC.

A couple of friends of mine mentioned to me that the city of Victoria does not have sewage treatment plants and dumps raw sewage into the ocean.

When I decided to dive at Ogden Point I was excited about diving from a breakwater (I am a novice diver) with a dive shop and cafe' nearby and I did not think much of what those people told me.

During the dive I though the water was OK and felt 'safe' from exposing myself to nasty bacteria etc.

Now I am writing a story about my diving experiences in Vancouver Island and I have begun to think harder about this issue of dumped raw sewage along that stretch of the island coast.

Betty Pratt-Johnson in her "151 Dives in protected waters of British Columbia and Washington State" did include this dive site in her book without mentioning the possibility of immersing yourself into a sea of floating human waste, chemicals of all sorts and heavy metals.

What are your feelings about it?

 

[archman]

A modern city such as Victoria should have basic water treatment capability. Canada's crappy reputation for er... crap in their water continues to astonish me.

For raw sewage, you don't want to be anywhere near the outfalls, nor downstream of it. That said, even tertiary treatment isn't even well shown to catch much of the pharmaceuticals and other synthetics being flushed down the toilet. Primary water treatment will catch all the poo and large debris, and secondary will chemically disinfect it to a moderate extent. This is the minimum level you should expect for most U.S. cities.

Being in cold water, you have a couple advantages:
1. full wetsuit/drysuit to partially protect you
2. reduced bacterial activity

If your diving area is generally upstream of major outfalls and the area is regularly flushed, you'll probably not get much poo and gunk and you. I would probably inquire about pathogenic bacteria monitoring in the local water, though. A lot of places routinely sample for this, even if their governments don't do anything further.

 

[Soakedlontra]

Thank you for the info.

What is also astonishing is the fact that there is a big sign on the breakwater that tells you all about the hazards and warns you that you dive at your own risk but doesn't mention anything about the possibility of raw sewage being present in the water and flocks of divers are perfectly happy to dive there...

I am wondering if that means that currents and winds do not push the sewage around the breakwater.

Another odd thing is that at one dive shop I saw a map of a dive site that non-divers call it 'sewage paradise' (something like that) but whoever drew that map thought it was a great place to dive because the sewage maintains a large quantity of marine life...

Have you ever heard of Professor Jack Littlepage?

Victoria Sewage Circus - chap10.html

(He wrote this paper in 1989 so I guess it may be not so relevant anymore. His ideas are rather 'peculiar', though)

 

[cmburch]

Link to CRD wastewater treatment
It looks like they are currently doing only screening.
How Wastewater Treatment Works

You can usually contact the plant site directly and ask if they perform microbiological analysis of the coastal waters, the locations, and with what frequency. It is public information and should be posted somewhere.

 

[Soakedlontra]

Link to CRD wastewater treatment
It looks like they are currently doing only screening.
How Wastewater Treatment Works

You can usually contact the plant site directly and ask if they perform microbiological analysis of the coastal waters, the locations, and with what frequency. It is public information and should be posted somewhere.

Well I gathered some information from a Victoria environmental group ( POOP: On the Road to Resource Recovery — POOP Victoria) and other divers from this board.

Yes at the moment they are doing only screening. The city has now decided to build a treatment plant. I hope that it will be one where the human body waste can be turned into energy (I have never heard of this possibility before) instead of being dumped into a landfill or exported abroad.

The city does monitor the quality of the water. I guess it must have been OK when I dived at Ogden Point because I did not see any signs with a warning about polluted water.

One aspect of this issue that still confuses me is the relationship between chemicals and heavy metals that find their way into the ocean through the sewer and our body.

It may be a dumb question but in order to be contaminated by these chemicals etc. do I have to eat contaminated marine animals or just swallowing polluted water is enough to accumulate them in my body?

 

[archman]

It may be a dumb question but in order to be contaminated by these chemicals etc. do I have to eat contaminated marine animals or just swallowing polluted water is enough to accumulate them in my body?

Ingesting animals that accumulate pollutants themselves is pretty gross. Bathing in or drinking polluted water is orders of magnitude less risky.

That's for nasty chemicals and metals, mind you. Pathogens are an entirely different ball of wax. They often *thrive* in wastewater.

Diving next to a major sewage outfall is probably not the most brilliant thing to do. People that regularly do so might wish to educate themselves in some basic microbiology and chemical oceanography.